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What Bitcoin Can Teach Us About Culture

How do we think about culture, how does it interact with the individual; bitcoin gives us a useful parallel

Rogue Missive #124 | Feb 3, 2026

I’ve been exploring the idea of a new ontology of the individual in economics. You can read more about that here. That line of thinking keeps pulling me back to culture, and to a familiar conceptual problem.

Culture is hard to think about clearly because it’s hard to say what kind of thing it is. Ontology is just a fancy word for that question: what sort of thing is this, and what is it made of? Culture is clearly real. It shapes behavior in real time and, over long horizons, creates selective pressure on genes. But it is not an object, a substance, or an institution in the narrow sense.

So culture must be something, just not the kind of thing we’re used to naming.

Thinking through this problem, it occurred to me that the Bitcoin network offers a surprisingly helpful analogy.

What Is Bitcoin?

From the beginning, people have argued about what bitcoin is. Satoshi called it “peer-to-peer electronic cash,” but that's a description, not an explanation. What is cash and what is it made of?

Is Bitcoin:

the UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs)?
the blockchain (a historical record of UTXO states)?
the rule set that governs validity?
the nodes and miners?
the wallet software we interact with?
the price quoted on an exchange?

We can describe all of these parts. But none of them, individually, is bitcoin. Bitcoin is something more than the sum of its parts.

This is the same problem we face with culture. We can point to books, rituals, buildings, flags, laws, and languages. We can touch them. But no one seriously thinks culture is any one of those objects.

Descriptions pile up. Explanations stall.

"Where Is It?”

Bitcoin, like culture, is not a substance. That matters, because the question what is Bitcoin? implicitly assumes that it is. And for that reason, it’s the wrong question.

Substances share a few basic ontological features. They are composed of parts, they occupy a location, and they persist independently of human participation. For those kinds of things, asking what is it? is exactly the right move. You can open them up, inventory their components, and point to where they are.

Take gold. What kind of thing is it? It is a chemical element with an atomic number of 79, composed of atoms with a specific structure, occupying space. I can touch it, manipulate it, and show it to you and say, "here. This is gold."

We can’t do that with Bitcoin, or with culture. So the ontological inquiry has to change.

For non-substantial things, ontology is not about composition but about conditions of existence. Philosophers have long recognized that when an entity resists definition as a substance, ontology must shift from essence to instantiation; from asking what the thing is to asking where and how it exists.

While researching for this post, I ran into this same shift in the work of John Searle, particularly in his writing on money and institutions. Searle notes that asking what money is leads nowhere, because money is not a substance. A dollar bill can be touched, but the money is not the paper. Instead, Searle reframes the question: under what conditions does money exist at all? His answer is that money exists only insofar as it is instantiated in ongoing practice amongst individuals. Its ontology is not defined by what it is made of, but by where and how it exists. I was struck by this, because it is the same ontological move I’m making here with Bitcoin and, ultimately, with culture.

Seen this way, several familiar features of Bitcoin fall into place. Bitcoin has no privileged location and is never literally “sent” anywhere; only information about transactions and state changes propagates across the network. It has no single material form that could be pointed to as the thing itself. Nodes, wallets, blocks, and keys are all real, tangible objects, but none of them is Bitcoin.

This is why the definitional debates never end. We keep asking a substance question of a non-substance entity.

For things like Bitcoin, the relevant ontological question is no longer what is it made of? but where does it exist, and how is it instantiated?

Where Bitcoin Exists

Bitcoin exists in nodes and between nodes.

Bitcoin exists in nodes as an internally instantiated logic. Each node contains the rules that define validity, maintains its own independently verified view of the ledger, and applies computation and judgment to incoming information. Nothing external tells a node what Bitcoin is or whether a transaction counts. The network does not confer authority; the rules do. In this sense, every node locally enacts Bitcoin rather than passively receiving it.

But no node, by itself, is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin also exists between nodes as a pattern of ongoing interaction. Nodes communicate peer-to-peer, propagate transactions and blocks, and continuously respond to one another’s behavior. No node possesses a complete view of the system, and no authority coordinates outcomes. Consensus emerges from repeated interaction under shared constraints. Coordination without a coordinator.

Taken together, Bitcoin is a network of nodes and humans in a specific interrelationship, enabled by supporting infrastructure like the internet, electricity, and hardware. It exists as a structured process involving specific agents and constituent parts, instantiated repeatedly across nodes and their relationships, and operating within a broader environment of cryptography, markets, competing assets, and opportunity costs.

Remove the in or the between, and Bitcoin disappears.

Culture Works the Same Way

Once this structure is clear, culture becomes much easier to think about.

Culture exists in individuals as an internally instantiated order. It lives as internalized language, norms, habits, and moral intuitions; as memory, identity, and expectation. Culture shapes perception and action from the inside. It does not merely constrain behavior from the outside like a rulebook or a threat. It is inhabited, enacted, and often taken for granted long before it is consciously reflected upon.

But no individual, by themselves, is culture.

Culture also exists between individuals as a pattern of ongoing interaction. It appears as shared symbols, institutions, traditions, prices, laws, rituals, and social expectations. These structures coordinate behavior, transmit meaning across generations, and persist even as individual participants come and go.

Taken together, culture is a network of individuals in specific patterns of relationship, enabled by supporting conditions like biology, communication, and material constraints. It exists as a structured process involving specific actors, instantiated repeatedly in people and in their interactions, and operating within a broader environment of geography, resources, technology, and history.

Conclusion

This analogy between culture and Bitcoin provides a strong foundation for thinking about what culture is and how it operates.

In both cases, boundaries blur between individual (or node) and system, between rules and behavior, and between constraint and choice. The whole is real without existing as a separate object.

Bitcoin and culture share a striking set of properties. Both are real but non-material. Both are distributed rather than centralized. Both persist over time without being stored in a single location. And both exert selective pressure on behavior without requiring conscious intent or centralized direction. They shape what actions are possible, likely, rewarded, or punished through their very structure.

This matters because it forces a reconsideration of the standard economic picture. If culture is real in the same way Bitcoin is real, existing in individuals and between them, then the idea of isolated individuals with fixed, exogenous preferences is incomplete. Individuals do not simply have preferences. Preferences are formed, filtered, and reshaped within structure that pre-exist the individual, constrain action, and act through human agents.

HODL strong. Thanks for being members!